Historian Upends Social Ideas

May 4, 1986|By Glenn Collins, Special to the News/Sun-Sentinel

Gerda Lerner, the historian, was talking about patriarchy, the form of social organization. ``As a system, patriarchy is as outdated as feudalism,`` she said on a recent morning after a meeting of historians at a New York hotel. ``But it is a 4,000-year-old system of ideas that won`t just go away overnight.``

Lerner has spent the last eight years researching and writing a book about that social system, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford University Press, $21.95). In it, she cites historical, archaeological, literary and artistic evidence for the idea that patriarchy is a cultural invention, not a natural or inevitable phenomenon.

``It`s going to be a very controversial book, I think,`` she said, ``because it sets forth a theory challenging some of the basic assumptions that underlie most of our systems of thought.``

Lerner, the Robinson-Edwards professor of history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, was a pioneer in the 1960s of the concept that women`s history is a legitimate academic discipline. She said she advanced the idea despite ridicule from some of her colleagues.

In 1963, Lerner taught what is believed to be the first postwar college course on women`s history and later established doctoral programs in the subject. She has written six books on aspects of women`s history, including Black Women in White America and The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History. In 1981, she became the first woman in 50 years to be named president of the Organization of American Historians.

According to the 65-year-old Lerner, her book, in examining the roots of patriarchy, ``offers the first coherent theoretical framework for women`s history.`` Although historically, patriarchy was a form of social organization in which the father or eldest male headed a family or tribe, the word`s meaning has been extended to mean governance or domination by men, Lerner said.

``Patriarchy has gone through many forms,`` she said, adding that as it exists now, patriarchy is ``an institutionalized pattern of male dominance in society.``

Lerner, who describes herself as a feminist, believes that the legacy of patriarchy in Western civilization has given men ``advantages that they shouldn`t have and to which they are not entitled.`` But she believes that in its inception, ``patriarchy was not an evil conspiracy of men,`` she said.

Speaking of early human societies, Lerner said: ``In a time when women`s average life span may have been less than 28 years, and when infant mortality was 70 percent to 75 percent, women were bearing and nursing babies all the time in order for the tribe to survive. So a sexual division of labor was created that was functional and approved of by both men and women.``

There was a biological basis for this division of labor, she said, ``but what came to be the oppressive part of that division was a social invention.`` Lerner views the establishment of patriarchy as a historical process that developed from 3100 B.C. to 600 B.C. in the Near East.

These exchanges, which uprooted young women, gave early peoples the notion that men had rights that women did not. She contends that because of several factors, including the domination of warlike tribes over egalitarian societies lacking a warrior class, women and children became the first prisoners and ultimately the first slaves in an era when male prisoners were killed.

Lerner says that the slavery of women and the exploitation of their sexual and reproductive capacity by conquering men marked the initial development of class distinction, and that ``slave women and children were the first property in these societies.`` She argues that the subordination of women became the basis for class distinctions, the basis for the concept of property itself, and ultimately led to the idea of men`s enslavement.

This turns on its head, Lerner said, the theory of Friedrich Engels that patriarchy was a sequel to the development of private property. It also means ``that the whole system of hierarchical governance and structure is inextricably involved with gender,`` she said, adding that ``race, class and gender oppression are interconnected and have been from the beginning.``

``Patriarchy is not based on a biological difference`` between men and women, Lerner said, ``but on a stage of human development when women had to nurse babies all the time.`` Thanks to changes involving longevity and mortality, ``Freud`s statement that anatomy is destiny is wrong,`` she said.

Lerner added: ``What Freud should have said is that for women, anatomy once was destiny. But it no longer is, and it should not be in the future.``

Her thesis will draw criticism from many, Lerner believes, including Marxists ``who will disagree with my new class theory,`` and some feminists who ``might not be happy with my analysis that upper-class women derived benefits from patriarchy and cooperated with it.``

Lerner hopes that her book will lead other scholars to ``rethink the origins of Western civilization,`` she said, adding: ``We need now to shift from an androcentric view of the universe to one in which we always think of both men and women as central to events. This could transform our entire historical body of knowledge.``